


The Lie in His Head

by compo67



Series: The Chicago Verse [138]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Adolescent Sexuality, Asphyxiation, Childhood Trauma, Dark, Dean Winchester Whump, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt, Established Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Flashbacks, Genderqueer Sam Winchester, Guilty Dean Winchester, M/M, Night Terrors, Old Married Couple, Oral Sex, POV Dean Winchester, Physical Abuse, Poetry, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Shame, Sibling Incest, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:27:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22890970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/compo67/pseuds/compo67
Summary: What's real and what's not?What's the line between dependence and addiction?
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Series: The Chicago Verse [138]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/46578
Comments: 14
Kudos: 136





	The Lie in His Head

When Sam offers, Sam  _ offers _ . 

Restless energy keeps them awake into blackbird hours. 

Outside, the neighborhood simmers in stellar silence. 

Inside, an incandescent session between Sam and Dean starts, sparring and strumming. 

Their bed provides a familiar, horizontal setting. 

Dean sighs. His eyes flutter. The muscles in his shoulders shake.

Two milky miles of moonlight stretch over Sam’s hair and highlight the pearly shine of his lips wrapped in a tight seal over Dean’s cock. 

Testing physical boundaries, Dean tilts his hips up. Blood rushes, intense and cathartic. He searches Sam’s throat with the tip of his cock. The North Star. How to find Polaris. A rough, exhaustive search. Sudden gravity. Reverence and revelry. 

Sam chokes. 

Dean shatters the silence around them. The sounds from his throat caused by the actions of Sam’s throat fill their room and seep into the hallway. Each reverberation ripples along floorboards and baseboards. Furniture in the living room soaks up his long, winding solos. 

Spit glistens over the heavy, hard line of his cock as Sam pops off. 

Backbeats. Resonant. Sam grips him by the base. Mouth open. Tongue flat. One complex, harmonic lick from thick base to leaking head to flushed underside. Mouth closed. Amber lips. Every shade of wildfire riot licking, slurping, sucking. 

Heartache. Muscle ache. Misfortune. Nightmare. 

Smothered. Stifled. Scraped off of motel asphalt--we don’t do these things to or with Sammy.

Shame provided starlight veils, guilty curtains, and double bolted locks. 

Everyone else’s eyes melted into individual sockets before reforming, reshaping, remaking this pair. This pair that looks up at him from a haunting, prophetic power differential. 

It’s been decades since he pitched the idea. 

Since he asked for the echo and flutter of sound recorded on miles of melanite tape. 

He labeled it PROUD MARY.

Tucked it in his off-brand personal cassette player. 

He listened to it on repeat the whole slip away summer of five/nineteen. 

“Stop it,” Sam stammers, his voice harsh and upset. “I can hear you in my head.”

Is it dependency or addiction? 

“I played that tape until the batteries died. I played it until the next batteries died. I played it over and over again after you left. I stuffed it under my pillow every night and I wore the one sweatshirt you didn’t notice I swiped. I ate with it clenched in my hand--at every truck stop, gas station, and cheapo diner. I played it like I stole your voice and kept it for my own. I played it until he found it, listened, and introduced me to hard steel against an exposed pipe in the wall near a drain. I committed myself to the misery of your voice in pieces and my body submerged in sprays of holy water, salt, and ash. I played it in my head and added lyrics with all the words spelled backwards. I played it until the deluge of glacial water and omnivorous hands drowned it all out. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t breathe. I became the reason you ran away.”

Sam turns on a light. A hard shift in survival. 

The light casts gunpowder shadows aside. 

“You’re sleepwalking, Dean.” 

He could make a new tape. 

“Hey, listen to me. Dean. You’re sleepwalking. Dean.”

All he needs is for sound to fit under a pillow.

“Stop it!” 

What to do with all this power.

“Wake up!”

All this pressure.

“I can’t breathe…” 

All this sway.

“STOP.” 

Sam cuts Dean lose from his place floating above the bed. 

Dean chokes, sputtering and gasping, clawing at the sheets. His eyes bulge with the amount of air forced in and out of his chest. 

Warm hands frame his face and force his mouth open. Blood tumbles out and stains his favorite Chicago Bears shirt. He had no idea his tongue could bleed like that. 

“He stopped breathing… I think it’s a seizure… I’m holding him--no, I won’t, I’ve got him on his side. We’re a two minute drive from UIC. The front door is open. Dean, Dean, stay awake. No, I…”

Another voice lays over Sam’s. Like a pencil tracing over hard lines. Shouldn’t images be drafted first before laid down in permanent ink? What was worse? The torture? That’s familiar. The cravings? Necessary evils. The desire? He had consent. The amount of water it took for John to stop? 

Or the single, solitary, slow-boil answer: Dean was human. Had been all along.

“Dean.” 

“What?”

“You’re snoring.”

“So?”

“Quit it or you’re sleeping on the couch.”

“Like hell I am. This is  _ my _ bed.”

“Oh, it’s  _ your _ bed? _ Your _ bed?”

“Christ. What a stunning legal argument, Professor.”

“Dean!”

“Ow, ow! Don’t pull my hair like that!” 

“Then quit being an asshole and sleep on your stomach, for fuck’s sake.” 

“Fine. Fine.  _ Fine _ . I’ll sleep on my stomach. There. Happy? Now, you get your freaking Sasquatch paws off my half of the freaking blanket.” 

“Would you quit it…”

“...my name is Sam and I love bossing people around, even in my sleep…”

“Hey! That’s not funny!” 

“Do you enjoy waking up at three in the morning just to take away the civil liberties of others? Is that how you became a lawyer? Huh?”

“Oh my god, do  _ you _ listen to yourself talk? You’re going to the sleep doctor tomorrow and I don’t care if I have to staple that CPAP onto your big head.” 

“That’s it. I’m sleeping on the couch.”

“Hell no. If anyone’s sleeping on the couch, it’s me.”

Dean sits up and gasps, his heart races against an invisible threat. 

The tracing and the line art fuse together.

“Sam,” he blurts out, one hand blinding reaching, the other pressed against his chest. “Sam, I…”

“What is it? Dean?” Sam immediately turns to face him. Gently, he places his hands on Dean’s shoulders. “It… sounded like you stopped breathing for a second.”

“I was dreaming,” Dean mutters, shaking his head. He pats Sam’s chest and sits back against the headboard. “Before this, I was dreaming.”

Astute eyes cut skip ahead several wordless questions. 

“Are you  _ sure _ that was a dream?” 

“Yeah.” Dean nods. He avoids eye contact by scrubbing his face with his hands. “Yeah. Just a dream.”

“...okay.” 

“Guess I… guess I should go to that doctor.”

“If you have sleep apnea and you’re not sleeping well, it’s bound to impact the quality of your sleep. The world doesn’t need you to crank up the grump levels.” Sam gets up from their bed and slips on a powder blue, satin robe--a gift from Dean last Christmas. His hair shines in the light of their bedroom, the texture soft with the help of a petite pink pill taken before bed.

Sam likes the pill. 

He says it makes emotions less like a chipped, battered mug of stale black coffee and more like herbal tea poured into a china cup.

To combat muscle loss, Sam jogs around the block every morning and lifts a few weights in his office. He hasn’t asked or said anything about linguistic changes. Dean’s razor sees more use than Sam’s now--his facial hair grows thinner and slower. 

In the past year, there’s added ease and tenderness to Sam’s smiles.

Soft hair. Soft skin. Soft Sammy, soft. 

Gently, Sam places cups Dean’s scratchy chin. “Try to relax.” Familiar fingers brush through his hair. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

It isn’t guilt.

It’s more complicated than that. 

“Yeah. Uh. Thanks, Sammy.”

Sam tilts his head a fraction, eyebrows raised for the briefest moment. “You’re welcome.”

Good thing Sam woke him up.

Good thing Sam can’t see the lie in his head.

**Author's Note:**

> i was up until 4 am one night last week and this happened. i was aiming to write poetry but it turned into something else. 
> 
> uhmmm despite the whumpage, i hope you enjoyed? hopefully? comments are love though! <3


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